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Three Things for Tuesday or Wednesday

A couple of weeks ago, I lamented the fact that Casey Fleming had stopped posting her weekly sermons. In her goodbye post last year, she said that in writing the sermons she had come to recognize that she has “the right subject matter, the right form, the right experience, the right motivation” to write a book, and she was going to take time off from her blog to work on that book. I hope that book is coming along well, but I’m also thrilled to say that Casey has resumed posting, and they’re as good as ever. Do visit nonseculargirl.com every Sunday, or subscribe to the site, so you can get the sermons in your email inbox. You won’t be sorry.

In his first post back, by the way, Bill says he’s contemplating writing a book, and he writes about writing as calling (the theme, coincidentally, of Casey’s most recent sermon). He says:

I am called now (including by the comments of so many of you here, which I value very much) to remember in what I write. I am called to write out of remembrance—but out of remembrance as the spiritual act of capturing (better: of pointing at) meaning that goes well beyond what is specifically called to mind by memory.

I am called to write as someone who challenges himself to be spiritually alive, writing what he writes not to please others, with a view to the success of what he writes or even the completion of what he writes. But because he must write. Because the significance to which the remembered events point needs to be captured, even if very imperfectly, in words.

And to be shared, passed on, transmitted.

Also, Bill was also kind enough to share my post on sex and union on his blog, where it generated lots of thoughtful comments.

3. Joan Didion on Marriage

Finally, I recently came across this 2011 conversation in Believer between Sheila Heti and Joan Didion. Whenever two people that smart get together to talk, something interesting is bound going to happen. This passage in particular, about marriage and motherhood, caught my attention.

BLVR: I want to ask you about the idea of the “extreme or doomed commitment.” You have a line in The White Album where you say, “I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic,” believing “that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments.”

JD: Right.

BLVR: I wonder if you consider marriage or motherhood, or even writing—

JD: I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.

BLVR: And having experienced motherhood and marriage, do you still see them as extreme and doomed commitments?

JD: No, I don’t. I mean, not—I don’t. I see them as, well, certainly they were for me a kind of salvation.

In her original formulation, salvation and doom aren’t mutually exclusive—in fact, salvation comes through doom. And, remember, Didion’s recent books have included Blue Nights, about her troubled relationship with (and the death of) her daughter, and The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband. So, in a real sense, for Didion, marriage and motherhood have been extreme and doomed commitments. And yet she doesn’t hesitate to affirm that they’ve meant salvation.

In a weird way, the exchange reminded me of Elizabeth Bruenig’s recent post on tragedy and marriage. Bruenig writes, “[I]f you allow tragedy to guide you to look beyond the meeting of needs, beyond the temporary scarcities and lacks of life on earth, you see that the irresolution of tragedy imagines a looming surprise.”

That surprise, Bruenig says, is salvation.

Of course, Bruenig is responding to a very different subject—specifically, the phenomenon of polyamory and the notion that marriage is supposed to meet every single one of our needs. And Didion probably wouldn’t hold her thoughts to exactly the same Christian meaning that Bruenig does. Still, it’s striking that, at least generally, the two come down in the same place, on the same word.